When climate policy's up in the air: How digital technology impacts corporate energy intensity

IF 13.6 2区经济学 Q1 ECONOMICS

Energy Economics Pub Date : 2025-02-17 DOI:10.1016/j.eneco.2025.108311

Xiaoli Hao , Erxiang Miao , Qingyu Sun , Ke Li , Shufang Wen , Haitao Wu

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Abstract

Digital technologies are becoming a key force in reshaping the contemporary energy system and energy structure, however, the uncertainty of climate policies caused by climate change brings new challenges and opportunities for enterprises to transform digitally and enhance energy efficiency. Drawing on data from Chinese listed companies spanning 2010 to 2022, empirical findings demonstrate that enterprise digital technology (DT) effectively reduces energy consumption intensity (ECI). Moreover, climate policy uncertainty (CPU) acts as a catalyst, amplifying the energy-saving impact of DT while further advancing its application within enterprises. Mechanism analysis reveals that DT contributes to energy conservation by improving total factor productivity and innovation efficiency, expanding enterprise scale, promoting digital transformation, and reducing costs. Heterogeneity analysis indicates that the energy-saving effect of DT is particularly pronounced in areas characterized by high levels of energy uncertainty, manufacturing sectors, and big data experimentation domains. This paper provides novel micro-level evidence for comprehensively understanding the interplay among CPU, adoption of DT, and ECI.

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来源期刊

Energy Economics ECONOMICS-

CiteScore

18.60

自引率

12.50%

发文量

524

期刊介绍： Energy Economics is a field journal that focuses on energy economics and energy finance. It covers various themes including the exploitation, conversion, and use of energy, markets for energy commodities and derivatives, regulation and taxation, forecasting, environment and climate, international trade, development, and monetary policy. The journal welcomes contributions that utilize diverse methods such as experiments, surveys, econometrics, decomposition, simulation models, equilibrium models, optimization models, and analytical models. It publishes a combination of papers employing different methods to explore a wide range of topics. The journal's replication policy encourages the submission of replication studies, wherein researchers reproduce and extend the key results of original studies while explaining any differences. Energy Economics is indexed and abstracted in several databases including Environmental Abstracts, Fuel and Energy Abstracts, Social Sciences Citation Index, GEOBASE, Social & Behavioral Sciences, Journal of Economic Literature, INSPEC, and more.